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Hillary and Me

The date was December 3, 2007, and the plane was a gleaming Gulfstream corporate jet, crammed to its wood veneer with bottled water, uneaten crudités, Hillary-Clinton-for-President staffers and a few reporters whose bosses had paid a fortune to fly with the frontrunner’s incipient campaign.

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The little plane circled the frozen rural Iowa runway a couple of times with an air of diffidence, like a purebred greyhound sniffing kibble, before diving down. The day was clear and blue. But foreshadowing the presidential primary season yet to come, something went unaccountably wrong when rubber hit runway. As the wheels slammed into the gravel-and-sand-covered ice, the little jet spun a few degrees off center, careening down the tarmac, perilously off-kilter. The instant the plane stopped, gray-blue smoke filled the cabin. “Now would be a good time” for everybody to deplane, the pilot suggested.

I popped out into the near-zero cold, and tried to steady my feet on the treacherous brown ice when I noticed Clinton operative Jay Carson, coatless and shivering, doubled over with laughter.

“What the hell’s so funny?” I asked.

“Do you even know where the fuck we are?” he said. “Clear Lake, Iowa! We’re in Clear Lake, Iowa! This is the runway where Buddy Holly crashed!”

Our plane, its engine fouled by runway gravel sucked into the turbine, was an early campaign casualty and had to be removed by a crane. When Clinton’s own jet—forced into a holding pattern for an hour by our mishap—finally landed, she sped off in a car to the Surf Ballroom (the same venue where Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper played their final notes) to deliver a pre-planned counterattack on the Obama and Edwards campaigns. She began with an apology to the audience on our behalf. I would have been on time, Clinton declared, if it hadn’t been for the press plane blocking my way.

***

I haven’t thought much about that incident, or about much at all that happened during Clinton’s crash-landed 2008 campaign, since then. In fact, I’ve probably spent less time thinking about my three-plus years covering Hillary Clinton as a reporter for the New York tabloid Newsday than any other period of my career. In part it’s because so many other people have picked over the bleached bones of the campaign. In part it’s because after the ’08 primaries I jumped into other assignments that diverted me to Capitol Hill and the Obama White House. But there were other reasons not to linger. I regarded the whole period as a time when nearly everything that could have gone wrong actually did, and not just for Clinton.

Thrush on primary night, 2008, in Columbus, Ohio.

As far back as early 2007 you could feel the economy collapsing, sense the spreading fear at town halls in Ohio, Indiana, South Carolina, New Hampshire and Nevada when Clinton would sign copies of her memoir and we’d wade into the crowd to fill our notebooks with other people’s problems. The newspaper business was imploding too, and my own paper endured wave after wave of buyouts and reorganizations. One day in late February 2008, when I was holed up in a Cincinnati hotel room, a friend informed me that Newsday’s five-person national editing staff had been sacked en masse. I’d now be filing to the Long Island desk—you know, along with the traffic fatality reports. What that implied was clear soon enough when I cornered Bill Clinton and extracted a comment about a top campaign donor who just been accused of corruption. “He was hiding in plain view,” Clinton told me. But my editor posted the quote as “He was hiding in Plainview”—assuming I’d meant the guy lived in a Nassau County commuter town of the same name.

Clinton’s campaign disintegrated almost as precipitously—especially after her devastating loss in the Iowa caucuses, which the candidate and her staff blamed partly on a press corps they believed to be in the bag for Barack Obama. The rage was intense, and intensely self-defeating.

Around that time, I was chatting with a source in Clinton’s campaign headquarters who had retreated to a stairwell with his BlackBerry when his boss stormed through the door and shouted, “Who are you talking to?” The next thing I heard was the thunk-thunk-thunk as the phone bounced down the concrete steps.

“Call you right back!” the official offered gamely, after retrieving his battered device.

Things were just as bad for me personally. My father was diagnosed with end-stage dementia at the start of the campaign, and his health failed in lockstep with the political fortunes of Hillaryland. In the intervening years, after my father died, I grew to view the whole 2008 thing as creepy and hexed, the Macbeth of presidential election cycles.

Like most ’08 veterans, I had sworn off covering Clinton ever again, never mind the looming 2016 presidential race and Clinton’s overwhelming perceived advantage. Then, a couple of months ago, I was teamed with my Politico colleague and fellow Hillary ’08 veteran Maggie Haberman to work on a story about Clinton’s long and rocky relationship with the political press. Here was a pretty straightforward and circumscribed assignment, and we had no trouble inducing people to flesh out the details of what we already knew: Clinton feels as if she’s been unfairly targeted by reporters over the years, was deeply hurt by the searing coverage of her personal life in the 1990s (conjured anew by Monica Lewinsky’s I-want-to-be-left-alone exhibitionist riff in Vanity Fair this month) and believes that the “scars” she’s earned were inflicted by a frivolous and vulpine media.

The PTSD is mutual. I collected a lengthy source list of people to call, standard reporting procedure, then stared a hole into the 50-plus names on the list. The phone seemed heavy. I just wasn’t making the calls. Procrastination is a journalistic birthright, but this was different. I clipped my hedges, reached out to long-neglected relatives on Facebook. Air filters were replaced. I changed the oil in the car 2,000 miles before it was required. I started reading poetry—poetry—anything to avoid returning to the headspace of 2008. When I began reporting, I found myself subjected to the familiar hectoring and browbeating, the same lecturing about journalistic practice delivered by current and former Clintonians—people with whom I had grown friendly over the years. I had the feeling of old roles being readopted, trenches being dug for the next stalemated battle. A question ran through my head as I dialed the numbers:

Who the hell needs this?

***

I have no idea what kind of campaign Clinton will run if she decides to go for it in 2016. I do know she’ll be formidable if she runs as the earthy, empathetic Midwesterner who showed up in the spring of 2008 when, paradoxically, all hope was lost.

But that was late Hillary. Early Hillary—the aloof, front-running pre-New Hampshire vintage—was a genuine chore to cover. This was the ultimate negative campaign: too much anger, too many fingers pointed, too much fear, too many festering internal resentments and the idiotic, all-encompassing presumption that everyone had the worst possible motives at all times. Its origins were less important than the fact that the candidate, who set the tone for her campaign, allowed it to persist. Forget a new campaign manager, she needed a feng shui consultant—or an exorcist.

I was there, on the eve of the Iowa caucuses, when Clinton boarded the press bus for the very first time to offer a bag of Dunkin Donuts bagels as a peace offering after months of giving us the stiff arm. The candidate was smiling, but her eyes said something different—and so did her feet, which never budged past the white line that separates bus driver from passenger. It is the only time I can ever recall a group of reporters happy to see a major newsmaker depart.

All presidential campaigns are a grind, but this one was worse. A few Clinton staffers I knew suffered partial nervous or physical breakdowns after months of combat and sleep deprivation. They jumped on desks and screamed at each other. They drank too much, wept, cheated on their girlfriends, wore the same sweatpants for days at a time and ate their ice cream out of the tub. One Clinton aide was so run down by the experience it took her years to recover her health—and several other campaign veterans I interviewed for the Hillary and the media article said they had no desire for a second go.

Clinton traveling press Rick Pearson and Glenn Thrush work out of a bathroom at a stadium where Clinton was speaking in Austin, Texas on March 3, 2008.

Reporters hardly fared better. The veterans removed themselves from the road to preserve their sanity (I skipped her last campaign trip after she stubbornly refused to concede the election at a Manhattan “farewell” rally on June 3, 2008). At least one reporter was involuntarily pulled out of action by his editors for fear he was about to collapse. One of the country’s most respected political scribes took to travelling with a shoebox crammed with various over-the-counter meds because the stress and sleep deprivation was running down her immune system. By mid-campaign she was in such a daze she nearly boarded a commercial flight barefoot before realizing she’d left her shoes at the security checkpoint, one of her friends told me.

The yelling and screaming, the best-known feature of the Clinton press operation, didn’t bother me much—perversely, it endeared them to me. Most of Clinton’s press operatives were fellow New Yorkers. I had dealt with them for years, and thought it was funny to hear them lose their cool. But I was an outlier: They needlessly offended the more decorous national press corps, who didn’t appreciate mud wrestling. “They had the worst press operation—for their candidate as well as for the media—of any Democratic campaign I’ve covered in 25 years,” longtime Newsweek editor Jonathan Alter said after the campaign.

And there was too much self-pity, too much umbrage. Shortly after Clinton adviser Mark Penn had gone on cable to repeatedly remind viewers that Obama had done cocaine, Clinton held a press avail and I asked her, ever so respectfully, if she had ever snorted. It was an obvious question for any reporter to ask, but she responded with wide-eyed surprise and refused to respond. Two weeks later, when I returned to my office from the road, my voicemail was brimming with outraged Clinton staffers accusing me of leveling a low blow.

They seemed almost willfully ignorant of courting, or even acquiescing to positive press. When a 27-year-old Chelsea Clinton made her first appearance on the trail, I approached the former first daughter at the end of a New Hampshire rally with this hard-hitting query, “Are you having fun?” She responded with regal contempt: “I don’t talk to the media”—to which I replied, “But you are all grown up now.” An innocuous word from Chelsea would have gotten the campaign a happy headline and a soupcon of goodwill; instead, I recounted the brush-off in a blog post and got a Drudge link, as I recall.

Politicians (and their families) ignore us all the time and still get elected. But the campaign’s communication flaws were really just an extension of a deeper disorganization and internal confusion that even the least experienced reporter on her plane could see. It wasn’t her ill-fated decision to compete in Iowa—the caucuses that would vault Barack Obama into history—that was fatal. It was how hard she ran. This was a mad dash, not the strategic marathon run by the Obamaians; the biggest problems didn’t seem to be political, but logistical.

Clinton insisted on scheduling one or two more events per day than Obama did in an attempt, we assumed, to prove her earnestness and work ethic. That may seem like a minor matter but reporters—even the non-whiny ones—began to feel like hostages, especially compared with the Obama embeds who seemed fat, happy, healthy and well rested by comparison.

Daily campaign journalism isn’t exactly God’s work, and Clinton’s bruising schedule exacerbated our collective gotcha impulse. I quickly learned to rest through her first few appearances—when she was disgorging her talking points—to be wide awake for later events when a tired Clinton was more prone to embellish, improvise and err. She often obliged. In late December 2007, I was standing in the back of a last-event-of-the-day Clinton rally in Dubuque when she related the tale of her 1995 “corkscrew” landing in Bosnia under sniper fire. After Clinton was done speaking, I joined two of my best friends on the bus, Matt Stearns and Mike McAuliff, to fact-check the anecdote in a copy of Clinton’s memoir borrowed from a nearby retiree who was waiting in line to have her book autographed. There was no mention of snipers in her account of the incident—just details of a goodwill mission with baggy-pants comedian Sinbad, singer Sheryl Crow and Chelsea. We wrote it up, it popped nationally and the episode became a low-grade, lingering embarrassment for the campaign until Clinton conceded three months later that she had been “sleep deprived” and had misremembered.

It wasn’t any innate hostility to Clinton that soured her relationship with the press. It was the pointlessness of so much of what she did in those early months and the strain of fighting her flacks and the schedule each day. I remember watching a usually stoic Secret Service agent cursing Clinton on the tarmac in Milwaukee when she ordered the campaign’s rattletrap 737 to fly up into a blizzard, knowing we’d have to turn back, just so she could say she’d attempted to fly to a rally in Madison.

The gesture was meaningless. She lost Wisconsin by 17 points a few days later.

***

Prior to the 2008 race Clinton told me, presciently as it turned out, that presidential elections were unpredictable because opponents “attacked your strengths,” not just your weaknesses. Obama got in her head because he challenged her bedrock narrative—that she was a war-averse child of the Vietnam era, that she was at the vanguard of her party’s commitment to racial equality, that she was the standard-bearer for hope and change. That is far less likely to happen in 2016.

And truth be told, the process of writing about Clinton was different, and better, in 2014. When our story ran, we heard some of the expected grousing, but it was more generic, Obama-level bellyaching—and the criticism tended to be more constructive.

Our piece appeared in a relative doldrums, just days before House Republicans re-lit the Benghazi bonfires, Monica broke her “silence” and press speculation about Clinton’s new memoirs heated up. As the media circus starts setting up its tents ahead of the book’s rollout next month, alot of attention will be paid to Clinton’s opening moves, whether she’ll be more or less accessible to the press, what she’ll write about Benghazi and how she’ll define her life’s “narrative”—whatever that means.

But if 2008 taught me anything, it’s that mood is more important than modus operandi: How will Clinton react when things go south? Will she shrug off the hits—or go to the dark place?

She’s a lot more appealing in the light.

A couple of months before the Clear Lake, Iowa, flight, I was covering her speech at a Democratic dinner in Little Rock, an ambivalent homecoming to a state that had decidedly mixed feelings about the Clintons. As I followed her progress on the rope line after the speech, my wife called with alarming news: My four-year-old son had spiked a fever and suffered a seizure, flopping unconscious onto the floor. A Clinton aide noticed something was wrong and asked me what had happened—followed by Clinton, who wanted to know the details.

A few minutes later, the staffer came back. “The senator says you can fly back east with us on the plane if you need to,” she said.

I didn’t take Clinton up on the offer—my son quickly recovered—and I didn’t think it would have been appropriate anyway. But the moment has stuck in my mind, and done as much to shape my perception of Clinton as all the cold shoulders, hard feelings and hard landings on ice. It was spontaneous and generous, a glimpse at the “Real Hillary” her staff so adores—and reporters so seldom see.